How Call of Duty: Ghosts is changing the game

It’s not just the addition of dogs that will seperate Call of Duty: Ghosts apart from its competition and previous iterations of the franchise. A trio of development teams, led by Infinity Ward, is working on upgrading Call of Duty for the next-generation, and it begins at the engine level. Call of Duty: Ghosts has been billed to have a completely re-tooled next-gen engine, and one of Infinity Ward’s lead animators recently sat down with OPM to give the details about the “new” tech.

When Activision revealed Call of Duty: Ghosts to the world, they told us that there would be a completely new engine for the game. This might not be 100% true. It doesn’t appear that Infinity Ward is making a new engine from scratch, rather refining on top of the refinements that arrive each year. Zach Volker of IW explains:

It’s impossible to develop a new engine from the ground up in a two year cycle.

“When we’re talking about a new engine we’re talking about upgrading significant systems within in that engine. We’re not talking about throwing it all away and saying we’re starting from the ground up… It’s impossible to develop a new engine from the ground up in a two year cycle.”

So while Infinity Ward may not have scrapped everything completely for Call of Duty: Ghosts, there sound like a lot of big changes coming to the way people experience Call of Duty. Volker says that this philosophy carries over into multiplayer, and that the developers are looking for ways to make the game more interactive.

“Every map in multiplayer we’re looking at trying to come up with some sort of way of making it a little more interactive, a little bit more asymmetrical.” Volker goes on to explain different examples of new gameplay types in the interview, which sound vastly different from what we’ve seen in previous Call of Duty games. “One near example that we’ve been throwing around is a sattelite crashes in the center of the map and it’s a race to whoever can get there first and activate it… There, we also have some larger-scale things where there’s going to be a map-wide earthquake and that’s going to affect the map in a certain way.”

So while Call of Duty Dog might have stolen the spotlight during Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal, there are certainly large changes afoot for the Call of Duty franchise with Ghosts. We’ll likely be hearing a lot more about the shooter come E3.